Not long ago, I had my office server connected to the Internet through a consumer cable connection without a fixed IP address. This worked OK for a while as the IP address didn’t change very much. But about 2 months ago the ISP changed the way they did things and my IP address was changing every day. I thought I had better bite the bullet and a get a business ADSL 2+ line with a fixed IP address, so I did. But I was reluctant to give up my cable connection as it had been reliable (plus the modem was all paid for). So I started to investigate the feasibility of keeping both Internet connections for redundancy and possible load balancing. I was surprised to find that there are quite a few routers out there that are designed to connect to multiple WANs and do all the failover and load balancing for you. The Linksys RV082 looked like a good candidate and I managed to find a second hand one for $150.00 (Australian). I was so surprised how easy it was to configure. I downloaded and installed the latest firmware to start with. Then I plugged the ADSL modem into one WAN port and the Cable modem into the other. I configured each connection and then ticked a box for load balancing and that was it.
Here’s a photo of the whole rig:
Here’s a couple of the config screens:
I was just so impressed with the RV082. It has been extremely reliable and does exactly what it is supposed to do with very easy configuration.